“There’s no such thing as rabbit trails,”
one of my English professors recently said at a department end-of-semester party. Such a phrase, at the time used casually and likely without any connection to metaphysics or more complicated imaginings, nevertheless hit me at the moment hard enough that I jotted down a record of it on my phone for future reflection. In fact, that throw-away line has stuck in my head ever since then.
What is a rabbit trail, anyways? Well, in the literal sense of the word, a rabbit trail is a path that a rabbit traverses during its day-to-day life. Rabbit trails can also be understood as the scents that hunting dogs (or ordinary pet dogs) track when they catch wind of rabbits that have passed by. Rabbit trails, then, can be construed as intentional, useful pathways–when taken purposefully by rabbits–or as things that attract the attention of other creatures, often inadvertently or frustratingly, as many a dog owner can attest.
This look at the “natural” origin of “rabbit trails” explains the normal use of the idiom, at least partially. Rabbit trails are usually tangents or diversions that beg for our attention and can transform conversations within seconds. Sometimes conversations or lessons never recover from the delightful rabbit trails. As an example, I remember a lesson in my Classical Quadrivium education class where we meant to talk about the readings we had covered in the prior day, but we actually ended up examining a “continuum” of classical education and learning how to avoid so-called “hypo-classical” and “hyper-classical” modes of teaching. That was all very interesting and practical for a potentially aspiring teacher, assuredly, but it was fairly far from the readings! Indeed, I do not currently remember what we had read for that day, nor precisely what we had planned to study in that fifty-minute class period; only that intriguing “rabbit trail” foray remains in my mind.
Returning to my first story, while the end-of-semester-party professor spoke no more about the “rabbit trails” and his opinion on them, I believe that there is more to the statement than meets the eye. It deserves investigation. The professor was referring to the tangents that he and other students of his day would propel their own teachers toward during theoretically-orderly class sessions, and even during office hours. As a matter of fact, though, the sentiment seemingly applies not just to in-class diversions from the literature intended to be studied on a class day, but also to out-of-class living in the world.
You see, we “walk” in crooked paths and meet intersecting “trails” wherever we go in life, and that is okay. I did not think that I would end up as an English major with the possibility of teaching when I entered college, but here I am, exactly that! Before college, I would have scoffed at English majors and called them rather useless, boring, and impractical. Judging by my past that was so steeped in 4-H and competition and raising livestock, I ought to have been a poultry science major, or a farmer, or an animal science major at a large university, at a minimum. I ought to have gone to Mississippi State University or Iowa State University or any in-state university back home–surely not to Hillsdale College and its liberal arts-y, classics-steeped, metaphysically-inclined offerings.
Truly, some people might reasonably ask me, what good was it for you to spend so much time in 4-H, to suffer under so many competitions, to fill your head with facts about chickens and rabbits, to spend ten hours at rabbit shows each spring weekend, to clip goats in 95-degree heat, to labor in intensive science classes and killer four-hour Organic Chemistry labs, to dedicate freshman summer to wrangling snapping turtles and tramping through mud, to strive unceasingly toward a hypothetical veterinary school, and then…to throw it all away and become an English major?
All the good in the world.
I grew at Hillsdale, despite this adventure being a windy path that I never thought I would take. I want my journey, even if it is at the very beginnings in the scheme of a long life, to encourage any who read this blog. Crooked paths and rabbit trails are acceptable, even good.
As I compose this, the phrase that echoes in my mind is “nothing is written.” Such a line comes from the main character of the 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, that I watched recently. Now, we surely could argue about whether anything was fixed, certain, determined, and fatalistic in that film, contrary to those words, but that is not my aim here in this particular article. I care more about the extrapolated point that there are not (as far as we can tell) definitive, intrinsically-perfect plans for life that avoid all mistakes and that, if abandoned errantly or purposely, will ruin your life irreparably. “Nothing is written;” what we maintain in our minds as correct and desire to plan, control, and act upon may not be the best, or at least not the only, trajectories in life.
I will take that phrase and briefly attach it to the concept of rabbit trails and how they are good, based on my experiences following my choice to attend Hillsdale College and not another “more practical,” more obviously applicable, school.
Here’s how.
- I became a Christian while at Hillsdale College
Said another way, I “found myself” and my actual identity.
One could argue that this transformation is the most important of all the things that happened to me at Hillsdale College, for it has eternal ramifications and affects my life choices in the present. At a different school, I would not have been invested in the same friend group that led me to Christianity, would not have found the exact same church that has assisted me in my Christian walk, and would not have had the same opportunities to be involved in campus ministry groups and grow in discipleship. This is not to say that things could not have worked out somehow, or that God could not have worked in another way if I had gone somewhere else besides Hillsdale, but the fact remains that so many different people, events, and elements uniquely came together to enable me to become a happy, involved Christian at the college I chose to attend. I could not have written the story myself.
- I have met people and friends whom I tremendously value
That is to say, I have learned to live with greater delight and love because of the people around me.
If I had taken the most logical steps and gone to a different college, I would never have met the same people who have enriched my life so much. I could not walk through campus and smile at the professors, students, and staff members that I now know here at Hillsdale. I would not be able to express my love and care for them all in the same way. I would be a “smaller” person without the investment of these beloved people in me and without the chance to give back to them. I firmly believe that the people that I count as friends, mentors, and companions were put into my life for a reason, and I in theirs.
- I learned important skills from my Biology classes
I can see and appreciate how skills and experience cross over between disciplines.
Like it or not, my pre-English major “rabbit trails” into the Biology and science fields still had their merits. I may not be a Biology major or any other science major anymore, but during that 1.5 years in science, I did practice hard work, discipline, critical-thinking, memorization, pattern identification, troubleshooting, labwork and lab techniques, and writing, among myriad other skills, that I will still use in my current English major and in the rest of my life. It is amazing how much concentration it takes to divide one species of caddisfly from another and how much perseverance it takes to complete a four-hour Organic Chemistry lab when everything is going wrong, for example. I even had wonderful experiences with people whom I met in those science fields, think fondly of some of the professors I had, enjoyed my time in nature (like in my Ecology class), and feel the confidence boost that I survived and thrived in Organic Chemistry!
- I overcame trials and struggles that built character
I am “etched” in a certain way by my experience at an inner level.
In the past three years, I have had issues with friends, relationships, school, exhaustion, health, and many other areas. Hillsdale College is not an easy college, academically or otherwise, not that any college is easy. Growing up at all is difficult, and being at college brings those chances to grow and those opportunities to fail or make a naïve fool of myself to light. Every challenge and accomplishment forms people–forms me. I believe that Hillsdale College provides unique chances to develop as a person. Certainly, I would not be who I am today without my time here, even with all of its challenges.
Those four points aside, the other thing that comes to mind as I consider “rabbit trails” is the nature of rabbit trails themselves. Rabbit trails pass through dense brush, through grassy meadows, and often even extend underground before popping back up again in the most unlikely of places. Crooked rabbit trails or ones that descend beneath the ground’s surface may seem pointless to us, but they enable rabbits to avoid predators, cover the most suitable ground–and get under fences.
In some sense, rabbit trails can thus be related to the idea of classical-tradition epics, which gives them purpose and ought to prevent us from making derogatory comments about them! To explain further, in almost every epic, whether a poem or a story along the lines of Moby Dick, every hero must descend into an “Underworld,” often below ground or water. This is the case for Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, Phoebe in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and so on. The heroes of these epics experience trials in their Underworlds, but they emerge with new understandings, virtues, and strengths, not to mention their lives (usually).
If we follow “rabbit trails” of our own minds, we may do likewise, descending into thickets of hard questions and harder answers, running from predators like despair and slothfulness, and hopping around areas of knowledge too dangerous for us small, finite creatures to explore, but ultimately navigating to safety and higher ground with renewed knowledge, vigor, and perspective from those survived challenges. We join both rabbits and those epic heroes in such endeavors.
So, when we “go on rabbit trails,” we actually have not strayed too far from the point of life and of everything. “Rabbit trails” do not really exist, that is. Whatever twists and turns we may have taken in our lives have consequences, but they form us into who we are, and they fit within–I would argue–God’s Providence and plan. The most minor conversation, the single choice to go fishing this day instead of that day, to take that path instead of this road, or to attend this particular college for four years and not that one, despite its quirks and originally unclear applicability, are only “rabbit trails” from our perspectives.
Without them, we would not be who we are–I would not be who I am.
Nothing is ever really wasted. Not even rabbit trails.